Saudi Arabia’s UK-supplied Eurofighter Typhoons are playing a central role in Saudi-led bombing campaign in Yemen.
While Syria’s and Iraq’s wars ground on, the Saudis would
dramatically open up a new front in the regional war: Yemen.
State authority and security in Yemen had rapidly
deteriorated over the course of 2013-14 as the political stalemate continued.
Armed skirmishes broke out across several fault lines. The Houthis fought
against Islah-affiliated Islamists, while Hirak southern secessionists fought
with the Yemeni army. AQAP seized considerable territory, while unidentified
forces (often blamed on Saleh) escalated attacks on oil pipelines and
infrastructure. Through all of this, the UN’s Jamal Benomar continued to
doggedly pursue a National Dialogue, which would provide the foundation for a
legitimate new Yemeni constitution which might finally put its fractured pieces
back together.
That process ended abruptly in September 2014, when Houthis
swept down from northern Yemen into the capital Sanaa and seized power.
President Hadi, placed under house arrest, announced his resignation as president,
but then rescinded the resignation after his escape to Aden. Hadi evocatively
described the Houthi takeover of Sanaa not only as an attempted coup but also
as identical to the ISIS seizure of Mosul. He blamed the Houthi advance on the
support of Iran, an argument widely shared by the GCC leaders who had backed
Hadi’s government. The Houthis continued their advance far beyond their natural
home, seizing Aden too. Hadi barely escaped and was smuggled into exile in
Riyadh. The carefully managed Yemeni transition lay in tatters. Saudi Arabia
took in Hadi and defended his legitimacy as Yemen’s president, vowing to resist
the Houthi advances.
How did the Houthis end up in Sanaa? There was far more to
it than simple Iranian expansionism. The Houthi coup, as it came to be termed
in much of the Arab media, followed directly from a series of long-recognized
fatal flaws in the GCC transitional framework. The amnesty granted to Ali
Abdullah Saleh left him free to scheme against his successor, a role he played
with customary ruthlessness and brilliance. The National Dialogue over
federalism posed a direct threat to Houthi core interests. And the exclusion of
protestors and youth voices undermined popular consent to the Hadi government.
The nearly year-long National Dialogue, led by UN Representative
Jamal Benomar, made real efforts to include Yemen’s many stakeholders and
constituencies, and involved frequent, long consultative sessions. In contrast
to the hastily arranged 2012 presidential election, the National Dialogue was
an extended, sincere effort to construct a consensus around a long-fragmented
Yemeni polity. When it reached its decision point in January 2014, it had made
significant process on a wide range of difficult issues. The timeline
stipulated one year for the implementation of the recommendations, setting
January 2015 as a critical deadline.
But it had failed to resolve one key issue of contention:
Hadi’s determination to establish a new regional federal structure for Yemen.
Hadi reportedly believed that such decentralization would be the best way to
break Saleh’s networks of patronage, and, secondarily, to respond positively to
Houthi and southern complaints of domination from the center under Saleh. In
practice, the federal provisions seemed to threaten the autonomy and resources
of the provinces. The proposed new federal regions divided the constituencies
of the Hirak and the Houthis alike, while creating the conditions for the
central government to exploit oil revenues and to divide potential opponents.
The proposed National Dialogue framework intersected with local and regional
interests in ways which should by now sound familiar. The old elite which had
grown wealthy and powerful under Saleh worried about any changes which might
threaten their privileges. This made them easy prey for the machinations of
Saleh, who was keen to prevent Hadi from consolidating his authority over a new
institutional structure. Saleh himself retained vast wealth and a network of
associates spanning the Gulf (and the globe), which could underpin a challenge
to the shaky new Yemeni government.
The Houthis took a dim view of calls for their disarmament.
As the Crisis Group succinctly summarized their views in the spring of 2014,
“With their foes . . . determined to violently halt the peaceful spread of
their ideas, they insist on retaining their weapons, at least for now, to
prevent a state controlled by their enemies from crushing them.” This is the
same logic which motivated Libya’s Revolutionary Brigades, Syria’s armed
opposition, and other similarly positioned groups. In the months following the
conclusion of the National Dialogue, the Houthis expanded their position on
their home by winning a series of battles against the Yemeni army and local
competitors. They also attracted some degree of political support beyond their
local base by positioning themselves as avatars of discontent with the
machinations of the traditional Yemeni elite. They had unequivocally rejected
the November 2011 GCC agreement, which granted immunity to Saleh, a position popular
with many revolutionaries.
Their expansion increased hostilities with an alarmingly
wide range of Yemeni political actors. It also set off warning lights in
Riyadh, still fuming from its humiliating defeat at Houthi hands in 2009. Talks
between Abd al-Malik al-Houthi and President Hadi in April 2014 went nowhere.
The Saudis were fiercely opposed to any suggestion of compromise. Riyadh had
always viewed Yemen as well within its sphere of influence (whether or not
Yemenis agreed), but now increasingly viewed it within the wider regional arena
as part of the struggle with Iran.
For the Saudi agenda to succeed, however, the Houthis needed
to be stripped of their revolutionary identity and successfully framed as a
Shi’ite movement backed by Iran. Only that would allow Riyadh to assemble not
only a regional coalition, but also a viable grouping of Yemeni forces, ranging
from the Islah movement to southern secessionists, in support of their
“legitimate” president. Saleh’s efforts on this front had always failed, but by
2014, in the shadow of Syria and the coming nuclear deal, the regional context
had changed dramatically and sectarian labels had become far harder to escape.
Whatever the case, in March, a coalition led by Saudi Arabia
began a major military campaign against the Houthis under the American-style
tagline “Operation Decisive Storm.” This campaign was driven in part by the
shocking events on the ground in Yemen. It was also, to some degree, an
extension of the UAE-Egyptian cooperation on air strikes against Libya, which
some Gulf officials viewed as a successful test run for a viable test of a
model of effective Arab action and the construction of a joint Arab force,
discussed at the March 2015 Arab Summit.
But it was also intimately related to the Iran nuclear
agreement. The Lebanese journalist Ghassan Cherbel tellingly tagged it
“Operation Restore Balance.” Gulf officials viewed it as essential to respond
to the potential nuclear deal by demonstrating power and resolve elsewhere
against Iran’s regional aspirations—and, crucially, to compel the United States
to demonstrate its support for the campaign as a signal to Iran of its
continued commitment to the Gulf alliance. As the well-connected Saudi pundit
Nawaf Obeid explained, “Ever since the Obama administration embarked on its
disastrous policy of rapprochement with Iran, Saudi Arabia has been working to
establish a new defense posture whereby it can use its own military assets—not
those of traditional allies like the US, UK or France—to defend its interests.
Thus, when Iran attempted to overthrow the democratically elected government in
Yemen, a key ally of Riyadh, Saudi-led forces were deployed.”
The media component to this war bears attention. Saudi
Arabia fully mobilized its formidable media assets to support the campaign,
with al-Arabiya in particular broadcasting a ceaseless barrage of positive news
and opinion. Many Saudi journalists embraced their role supporting the campaign
rather than as neutral observers. For instance, in April, the leading Saudi
journalist Daoud Shriyan observed that “from the start Decisive Storm has faced
propaganda from regional media supportive of the Iranian project. How can we
respond to these lies?” The notion that the media’s role might not be to
support the government’s war was not even raised.
The air campaign diverted most of the GCC participation from
the ISIS campaign and devastated Yemen’s cities. It nonetheless soon proved
inadequate. Month after month of air strikes and naval blockade created
mounting humanitarian catastrophe but little political or military progress.
Recognizing the need for manpower, the coalition reached out to multiple
potential sources of troops. Saudi Arabia worked assiduously to mobilize the
tribal and personal networks which it had cultivated over decades in order to
put together sufficient local forces to fight and then to control liberated
territory.
Egypt seemed to many in the Gulf the obvious source of an
effective ground force, but Cairo deflected requests about entering the Yemen
war. While Saudis argued that Egyptians should be the most eager to join their
war, Egyptians did not seem to agree. The calls for Egyptian participation in
the Yemen war provoked an unusually sharp public divide in the Sisi-era
political elite. While the military regime understood well the extent of its
dependence on its UAE and Saudi backers, it faced considerable public
skepticism about a military role in Yemen. The historical memory of the
disastrous Egyptian war in Yemen in 1962-67 had long hovered in the back of the
Egyptian national narrative. Terrible memories of Egyptian conscripts dying
pointlessly in Yemen’s mountains had scarred a generation, albeit with little
public commemoration or acknowledgment. It was not common in the tightly
controlled and highly nationalist post-coup media to see headlines as openly
critical of Sisi as those which began appearing about Yemen.
The timing of the GCC pressure on Egypt to join the Yemeni
war could not have been worse. Egypt’s uneasy rulers were facing deep political
instability, an escalation of the long-running insurgency in the Sinai, the
collapse of next-door Libya, and a troubling growth of low-level attacks and
assassinations in Cairo itself. Even worse from an Egyptian perspective was the
inclusion of the Muslim Brotherhood-affiliated Islah movement in the Saudi
Yemen war coalition, and the general easing of Saudi hostility to the
Brotherhood under King Salman. The well-connected Saudi journalist Abd
al-Rahman al-Rashed ominously grumbled about Egyptian reticence towards the
Yemen war: “Egypt is big but it should remember that it needs regional
friends.” With Egyptian forces not forthcoming, the coalition turned to the
Sudan. President Omar Bashir was happy to offer some ten thousand troops to
serve as peacekeepers, presumably in exchange for Gulf help in easing his
international isolation. The role of an indicted war criminal did not seem
problematic.
In early August, the Saudi-led coalition scored its first
major victory by establishing a foothold in Aden and facilitating the temporary
return of the Hadi government to Yemeni soil. In a major departure for its
traditional military policy, the UAE landed some three thousand of its own
forces for the battle, and then left a substantial presence in place to police
the newly liberated territory. Accounts of a delirious reception by grateful
Adenis and the flying of Emirati flags were eerily reminiscent of the Libyan
welcome for Qatari forces in early 2011. Few who remembered Qatar’s Libyan
trajectory could be optimistic about the enduring popularity of the UAE’s
presence in Yemen.
Advancing towards Sanaa proved every bit as challenging as
critics of the war had warned. Despite the cheerful parade of propaganda about
impending victory, the reality was that the Saudi coalition’s advances stalled.
Liberating Aden from a widely hated Houthi occupation was one thing, but moving
into contested or Houthi-controlled areas of Yemen was far different. To
compensate, the coalition escalated its air strikes, causing tremendous damage
to little evident military purpose. The humanitarian toll of the Saudi-led
campaign was daunting indeed—and put a stark spotlight on Saudi rhetoric about
Syria, for those who cared to draw the comparisons.
By September, it was obvious to a growing number of
thoughtful Saudis and Emiratis that the war had bogged down into a quagmire.
The independent-minded Emirati political scientists Abd al-Khaleq Abdulla, in
the course of defending the war, acknowledged that many had come to “warn
against an unwinnable war in the poor, unstable and sharply divided tribal
Yemen, where a military victory is a mirage. Even if the UAE and the Saudi-led
coalition liberate Sana’a and the legitimate government is restored to power,
the military victory comes at an unbearable human cost and a bitter political
defeat.”
This is the way of quagmires. It is always easier to get in
than it is to get out, and the Saudis were now discovering yet again ancient
lessons about the limits of military power.
